> Or, from another perspective, they’re pushing for a URL shown in a navigation bar to represent the origin of a document, rather than where you attained it fro

> Or, from another perspective, they’re pushing for a URL shown in a navigation bar to represent the origin of a document, rather than where you attained it from. (Which is already true of SOCKS and HTTP CONNECT proxies, of course.) Very good points, but the devil lies in the details. Preserving authenticity of web content through public-key cryptography is of course a welcome change. But HTTPS is for encryption from the client to the server (Transport Layer Security). So browser UIs were designed so a lock next to a URL meant you securely connected to the host of the URL. That's what we've been teaching people browsing the web for more than a decade. Subverting the meaning of URL bars and HTTPS indicators to make Google's control over the web less visible to the end user is of course a very politically-motivated choice and is yet another direct attack on the web as we know it to promote corporate interests. I would be all in favor of adding cryptographically-enforced authorship information in browser UIs, but would rather add a clickable "person" icon next to the HTTPS lock. So in the end you would end up with visual indication that a secure connection was established to the Google AMP gateway (or whatever website) and that this website is sharing content that provably originated from somewhere/someone; you would just have to click the button to figure it out (just like for TLS connection details). Also, if authentication of content is a concern or interest of yours, maybe content-addressable systems such as IPFS/DAT (among others) could interest you. > formats will emerge to attach signed origins to more document types (e.g. images; PDFs) and then people won’t be able to do easily lose the source of these documents. There are already standards for doing precisely this on the web. ActivityStreams with Linked Data Signatures comes to mind, for example. But these corporations have no interest whatsoever in building an open and federated web. We're talking about Google. The company who, for example (among many other scandals) stopped federating their XMPP server (GTalk). From the switch of the button, they consciously chose to prevent millions of people who were previously chatting just fine to do just that. If that's not a manifestation of evil corporate power, i don't know what is.